🔥 digimon
Send me a “ 🔥 “ for an unpopular opinion
ohh this is going to be very spicy to most millennial digimon fans
digimon, as a brand, and as a fanbase, needs to move on from digimon adventure.
it's been nostalgia milked for years, its characters have been milked for years, its archetypes have been milked for years, the show itself for marketing has been milked for years. the fanbase too, largely focuses on this one canon for years, on the first ever tv show, its sequel, its other sequel, and some movies. the adventure canon gets the most attention and add-ons, and most digimon fan content also focuses heavily on adventure. even the "digimon artstyle" people latch on to tends to be the adventure style of drawing humans and digimon.
digimon itself has grown past adventure, the designs and artstyle gas evolved, the stories its tried to tell have slowly crept out of adventuee's shadow, there's new and creative stuff being done with the brand, in video games, tv show, manga, and more, yet bandai and the fanbase keep latching on to 90's era nostalgia. adventure even got a 2020 reboot, because the characters' image is so popular that they'd rather have just recycled them than do something original until ghost game.
appmon, one of the best seasons of digimon, was completely ignored by the fanbase, who believed it to be "too different" even though digimon has always been trying new stuff and reinventing itself, in the show, manga, video games, and even vpet devices, yet people too stuck in their nostalgia and too attached to adventure as the idea of what digimon should be, refuse to move forward with the franchise, and miss out on something genuinely great. digimon has always gotten by off of a loyal internal fanbase, but the above attitudes contributed quite a lot to appmon being a flop, and adventure 2020 being done as a "safe" way to get people's attention again. the difference in quality between the two is night and day.
now i like adventure (1999), its good, a really good first attempt for the tv anime, set a great groundwork, and had a great cast. but as time went on, its flaws have begun to show when really good seasons, good manga, and good video games have surpassed it, but bandai still leans too hard on adventure, and the fanbase eats it all up, never really appreciating what we've got. hell, digimon even has the "charizard problem", but even worse. agumon, gabumon, their evolutions, and particularly omegamon, get so many alternate forms, evolutions, mode changes, etc, that they end up in fucking everything, to a point where even some digimon take direct inspiration from them, and it feels as though we're never getting away from the same design core.
even the "genwunner" problem is more pronounced in digimon due to the smaller fandom size. there's just a lot of fans who rarely stray outside of adventure, adventure content, and adventure-era digimon themselves. there's a genuine wealth of varied, high quality digimon content out there to find, but it does feel as though the brand and the franchise is afraid of it.
adventure is getting another movie coming up soon, and while i am looking forward to it, i do wonder what it would be like if something like tamers, or savers, for example, got the same level of love from bandai and the fanbase at large.
i'm not saying adventure needs to be abandoned, disgraced, or forgotten, but i do feel as though digimon as a whole needs to rely on it less, and the fanbase needs to let go of it a little, and be willing to try new things, and enjoy a wider breadth of what digimon as a franchise has to offer. right now it just feels really odd to be a digimon fan, since it feels as though a noticable portion of the fanbase doesn't seem interested in anything other than stuff that came out over 20 years ago now, and is really missing out.
this was really long huh. uhhhhh go try out a season of the anime you've never seen, go play a video game you've never tried, give one of the mangas a shot if you like to read, go wild. i promise you bros, this shit's just as good today as it was 20 years ago. give it a chance.
